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Saturday, 2 March 2013

The cloudy blue skies underfoot and the giant silver clouds above signaled a Magritte moment at Raf Simons’s
gently surrealist and quirkily personal Dior show one infused with the
spirit of Pop, too. As he grows in assurance at the house, Simons seems
to be having more fun with its codes, and here, amongst the modernist
reworkings of some iconic Christian Dior
mid-century designs, he introduced a softer side and a silhouette that
seemed more 1920s than 50s. This unfitted flapper line harked back to
Dior’s own career as an art gallerist in the Jazz Age, and his
engagement with the Surrealists he was one of the first to show Dalí and
Giacometti.

A collaboration with the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts resulted in dresses and clutch purses
printed with Warhol’s charming late fifties and very early sixties
paintings of fashions and shoes, the precursors to his Pop work,
produced when he was a commercial artist working for magazines and
advertising accounts. A Warhol face printed on the filmy bodice of a
chiffon dress, or a shoe on a clutch, were surprising and intriguing
touches.

The playful invention continued in the reworking of
iconic Dior clothing. The classic Bar suit was made this season in wool
that mimicked denim, or worn with wide-leg Oxford bags; a short,
full-skirted satin evening dress from 1949 with a bustle back like
scudding clouds was reimagined in malleably fine black leather, and a
strapless ballet-length dress was embroidered in black leather blossoms
on dark net Dior’s 1949 version was in conventionally pretty pastel
silks. A dashing scarlet wool coat with a highwayman’s collar was a more
literal homage, but Dior’s love of dramatic, asymmetric draperies was
taken in a contemporary direction with hemlines sliced on the diagonal.

That
surrealist motif was subtly explored in the inventive knits worked into
a ruffled peplum or a sideswept bow loop to ape the exaggerated
silhouettes immortalized by the fashion illustrator René Gruau or woven
loosely enough to flash the signature houndstooth check beneath. That
sense of reveal was also explored in keyhole openings, or a deep
U-shaped neckline that framed a contrast-colored garment underneath.

Most
quirky and inventive were what Simons dubbed his “memory
dresses” fragile chiffon flapper gowns scattered with embroidery of
seemingly random but symbolic objects an eighteenth-century ring painted
with an eye; keyholes; or a rainfall of eyelashes. Magritte, Simons’s
fellow Belgian, would have been proud.